Firefox is a standards-compliant open source web browser developed by the free software community with the cooperation and support of Mozilla Corporation. Firefox provides all essential features of a browser for the modern web, and also a wide variety of add-ons that will undoubtedly satisfy anybody's needs and wants.

Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code.

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite. It includes key office applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, all with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites.

Sophisticated and flexible, LibreOffice also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office. It primarily supports the Open Document Formats (ODF), such as .odt (documents), .ods (spreadsheets), and .odp (presentations). Here at the LUG, these are the formats we primarily use. Also, many European governments are adopting ODF as the official format for electronic documents. ODF and LibreOffice promotes total interoperability and information integrity.

Pidgin is a messaging program that supports multiple protocols, including XMPP/Jabber (e.g. Google Talk), IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ, amd Yahoo!. It features many plugins and has a large community surrounding it.

Empathy is a messaging program that supports XMPP/Jabber (e.g. Google Talk), SIP, IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo!. It supports voice and video calls (only for XMPP and SIP), and has excellent integration with the GNOME desktop.

VLC is famously known as the player that "plays everything." It can handle DVDs, (S)VCDs, Audio CDs, web streams, TV cards and much more. You don't need to keep track of a dozen codec packs you need to have installed. VLC has nearly all codecs built-in. It can even play the file or media if it is damaged!

MPlayer is a movie player for Linux. It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, VIVO, ASF/WMV, QT/MOV, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, and OGG files, and some files for RealMedia. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, FLI, and even DivX movies too.

Another big feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. MPlayer supports displaying through a number of hardware MPEG decoder boards such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+ . And what about nice, big anti-aliased shaded subtitles (9 supported types!!!) with european/ISO 8859-1,2 (hungarian, english, czech, etc), cyrillic, korean fonts, and OSD.

GIMP is a professional raster image manipulation program, and part of the GNU project. It is suitable for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition, image authoring, or any other task that requires manipulation of raster images.

Inkscape is a professional vector image manipulation/creation program.

The GNU Compiler Collection contains frontends for C, C++, Objective C, Chill, Fortran, and Java, as well as libraries for these languages. It is a full-featured ANSI C compiler, with support for K&R C as well.

GCC provides many levels of source code error checking traditionally provided by other tools (such as lint), produces debugging information, and can perform many different optimizations to the resulting object code.